Five Tips On Using Facebook For Social Recruitment

Successful recruiters focus on the channels where their audience is most active with Facebook being the most effective for many businesses.

As reported by CNET in January, Facebook now has 1.23 billion members, with 757 million daily active users (up 22% from the same quarter last year) and on an average day in December, saw more than 6 billion likes so I think we can safely say it is worth investing in a Facebook Page for recruitment.

Your Facebook Page

Creating a Facebook Page is free. Your ‘Page’ is a public profile that enables you to share your business, products, your people stories, your industry news. You should populate your page with an imaginative mix of useful tips, interesting facts, imagery and latest news relating to your industry and your organisation to keep your audience engaged, encouraging them to share and spread your news and with it . You will need 25 ‘Likes’ (followers) before you are able to receive Insights, useful analytical data. However, if like me your Facebook account is private, you may find some of the potential talent reluctant to engage with your Page. A short note on the Page giving advice on privacy settings to reassure could prove fruitful.

Five Tips for Using Facebook for Social Recruitment

You can easily search Facebook Pages to find people both active and interested in your field. Starting or joining Facebook Groups related to your industry can reap networking rewards and will help you to understand your audience.

Clickable #hashtags makes it much easier to discover what others are saying about a specific topic.

If you are in the US you can post a job for free in the Facebook Marketplace and include extensive information the location. The limitation of a free job posting is that you cannot target it to a specific group of people as you can with a paid Facebook Ad. This service has yet to be rolled out in Europe.

Graph Search is currently in Beta mode and again only available in the US. This search functionality allows anyone to search and find terms in posts, updates, check-ins, pages, apps, groups, and comments from friends or those who post publicly.

Facebook Ads are simple to create, easy to manage and can be very effective in brand building with a little imagination. You can learn from the big brands such as Pepsi, Cadbury, and Volvo – the secret of their success? Understanding their audience before they developed the digital campaign strategy.

As you can see, Facebook are working hard to compete with the other lead social sites and continue their success.

A Word of Caution

When you find a potential candidate on Facebook and evaluate their activity do take care. CIPD’s recent social media research revealed that two in five employers look at candidates’ online activity or profiles to inform recruitment decisions, but few inform applicants as a matter of course that this is being done.

Employers have wide discretion within the law to decide whether or not to recruit a particular candidate. However, to avoid risk of legal challenge they should be fully aware of the law on data protection and discrimination in employment. The CIPD published new guidelines for HR Managers and recruiters in December 2013 and can be accessed online here.